mudslide

on getting swept up in other people's concerns

I was scrolling through my twitter timeline as I often do, and I found myself feeling a familiar old feeling from my teenage years. I remember feeling it when I was witnessing the social environment around me. The people around me seemed so frantically busy, yet seemingly towards no particular end. There didn’t seem to be a point to it. I don’t mean this in a dismissive way, like “oh, these stupid NPCs, these mindless sheep, how pathetic of them”. I remember being anxious, feeling lost in the madding crowd, like I was being swept up in a thick goopy mudslide. But I didn’t know any better then. It was a dark and challenging time. Being a teenager was harder for me than being an adult, harder even than being a parent.

I’d like to think that I have a bit more sense now as an adult– that I have had some life experience; seen some things, learned some things, know some things. I again find myself feeling like I’m being swept up in a mudslide, but it isn’t anywhere as strong and overwhelming as it was before, and I’m not as panicky and frozen as I was before. I get to observe more carefully now.

What exactly do I mean by the mudslide? When I was a kid, it was more physical– I did use the computer to go on the internet a lot, and I enjoyed reading and posting on forums, but mostly I think my life was still determined by the social reality around me– my parents, my teachers, my friends from school, the local music scene I participated in, and the wider Singaporean community that all of that was embedded in. It was hard to escape Singaporean culture while living in Singapore. I tried to touch on this a little bit in wallflowers – how the whole country felt like a complete bureaucracy, how everything was secondary to economic productivity, how anything artistic or beautiful or loving felt like it had to be put in a cell. I do think Singapore is quite a bit better now about this, and I choose to believe that it may continue to get better in the coming decades, if enough of us care to make the effort.

Over the past 2 decades or so, my life has been increasingly online. I still live in Singapore as I always have, though I’ve since had the privilege of visiting other places– I’ve left pieces of my heart in New York, San Francisco and Paris, each of which has given me a sense of how I might flourish along different dimensions, in different social environments. But really I think it’s true to say that the place I am most at home is On The Internet. Or maybe I should say “was”, because it’s quite possible that the internet that I think of as my home was really a temporary era of the internet, up until maybe ~2022. I don’t precisely know. I think there will always be people in the world who remember that internet that I’m talking about – the internet when it was marginally less corporate, less algorithm-driven, less hits-centric, and more exploratory. The web you surfed rather than scrolled. And so as long as those people exist, I imagine we will always find each other, and we will create amongst ourselves something like a simulation of the world we loved, and kind of lost.

But I don’t know. I was thinking about bloggers recently. I liked bloggers. I considered myself a blogger. I do feel like I’m trying to bring some blogging DNA into my substack. (Or maybe I simply can’t help but do that, because it’s a part of who I am.) But it’s broadly true that blogging, in the old sense, is essentially dead. The blog that I’d primarily reference and orient around is ribbonfarm, which ran from 2007-2024 before retiring. Here’s a quote from Venkatesh about the blogosphere: “It offered the frontier freedoms of the pre-web internet, but without the formidable technical barriers to access or narrowness of milieu. It offered the global reach of the platform era that came after, but without the inescapable culture-warring, enclosure effects, or enshittification.” It’s plausible that maybe what I miss about the old blogopshere was just the people– it was a collection of pioneers and weirdos who really had something to say, without expecting to be rewarded for it, at least not much. I might be romanticizing it. There were always also annoying people who didn’t really have anything to say. But it’s different now. And I’m not saying different is necessarily worse, but I think we typically see what’s worse before we see what’s better.

I still use the term Twitter a lot even though it’s technically called X now– initially this was a form of dissent, but now sometimes I actually do call it X, particularly when I’m trying to talk about the new management, the new culture, the new environment that feels different than the Twitter I knew. There will never be another Twitter, because the original Twitter was created in a more innocent, more naive, less polarized environment, before anybody even knew what social media meant, or would become. The analogy I use: imagine there’s an old grandpa that everyone in the family respects, and he hosts a barbecue every month that everyone attends. There are various people in the family who really don’t get along– even outright hate each other– but everyone loves grandpa, so everyone shows up and kinda tolerate each other at his barbecue. When grandpa dies, it’s not really going to be possible for one of his children to start doing the barbecues instead. I mean, they could try, but not everyone is going to show up anymore. Right away, you can see how this is sad. But maybe something good will come out of the fragmentation. That’s not so immediately obvious. But one must hope.

I’m amused to notice I still haven’t really talked about what I wanted to talk about re: the mudslide I brought up at the start. I’m basically talking about witnessing the people around me repeatedly having roughly the same conversations about the same things, in ways that feel unproductive to me. It’s possible, maybe probable-and-likely, that these conversations are doing something for those people, at the stage of life that they’re in. In some cases it seems likely that it might be a kind of displacement or avoidance behavior, but even in such cases I’ve come around to something like, that’s still doing something for them, and ultimately it’s really up to them whether or not they want to keep doing it. And me preaching at other people about avoidance has on occasion been my own way of avoiding living my own life. And I’ve grown bored of that.

Yeah, you know, maybe this whole post has been one long meandering ramble around the fact that I’ve gotten quite bored with everything. My teenage mudslide was a very excruciating sort of boredom– and I think ultimately I wrote the entirety of Introspect as a way of investigating that, dealing with that. And now I find myself bored in a similar-but-different way. And I’m skipping a significant one– I remember being bored around late-2016 in a way that, I think when I really faced up to it, nudged me towards the prolific state of being I inhabited from 2017-2022.

(source)

I think I’ve been done for a while now with my last “helpful chaplain/preacher” persona, but my experiments in figuring out what’s next have been unsuccessful. And actually, when I think about it more, I realize I haven’t been very thoughtful about the experiments. I basically just went something like “alright, i’m a media theorist now”, and didn’t think much beyond that. But there are loads of media theorists around, and I’m quite allergic to academic vibes (and I think it would be fair to say that I kinda tried to challenge myself to overcome this head-on, and struggled, and failed). I think the shift I’m looking for is to something less like “nerdy lecturer” and maybe more something like “circus entertainer” (hence the rephrasing from “frame studies” to “funhouse mirror”). But maybe this experiment might fizzle too. There are some secondary elements to consider as well, but I don’t really have the energy to think out loud about that right now. But I should think about it for sure. Maybe in another post.

I feel like I should end with another thought about what I’ve been gesturing at re: mudslides. I’ve been wanting to write a separate essay about being suggestible. I’ve observed that young kids are very suggestible, very impressionable, very much affected and influenced by their environments, both social and physical. They notice things a lot and they respond to whatever they see. They don’t yet live in their heads very much, if at all. By comparison, I do live in my head a lot, but I’m still also much more suggestible than I tend to acknowledge or admit. I’m reminded of a funny moment when I was staying at a friend’s place in NYC, and I woke up one morning to the sight of several people attempting handstands against a wall, and I went along with it and attempted one too.

I’ve thought and written a LOT about boredom over the years. My nutshell framing is: boredom happens is when a tired, cluttered person is trying to look for ‘optimal’ solutions while having unclear utility values, or win conditions. So even though there’s no shortage of things to see and do, it feels like there’s nothing. The closet is full and it feels like there’s nothing to wear. It’s not really about the clothes, it’s really about the internal state of the individual, who is in disarray with mixed intentions and no clear sense of what they really want, which is usually downstream of some kind of blockage, often a response to some other problem that needs resolving. It might be that you’re bored because there’s some conversation you need to have, some decision that you need to make that you’ve been putting off, and everything else is kinda bullshit until you address that difficult thing.

Yeah, as I write this out it feels clearer that, again, my sense of frustration or annoyance or boredness with other people is really a projection of how I’m feeling about myself. And the ‘mudslide’ feeling is a sense that I’m allowing myself to be swept up in the details of other people’s problems and concerns while neglecting my own.

So… what are my own? Ugh, this post is long enough and I have to get on with my day, ha. Maybe I’ll write about that later and publish it tomorrow.